Assassin's Creed: Crossed
by Jack Spheniscidae Enterprises
Summary: On December 21st, 2012, the solar flare did not end the world. But you'll wish that it did.


For whatever reason, I was possessed to write an crossover between Assassin's Creed and the Crossed comics.

tbh this was just a little experiment I did to pass the time and I probably won't finish it!

x+x

_It was so noble of him, wasn't it? There he was, caught in an impossible dilemma. Desmond Miles, the so-called chosen one, as the cliche goes. Torn between ending the world to let things repeat themselves as he became the catalyst of the next cycle of the endless war or to sacrifice his own life to give the world a chance at saving themselves in return for the freedom of Juno. No easy way out. Yet he had it in him, taught to him by the memories of his ancestors, to give up the life of one in exchange for the possible salvation of billions. _

_Maybe in another story, another life. But that wasn't exactly how things turned out in this one, did it? _

_When he opened his eyes three days later, imprisoned by Abstergo once more, he wasn't dead. But he soon wished he was. He felt it in his blood, coursing through every vein and artery. Gnawing at him, demanding him, trying to shatter all boundaries. And worst of all, even though it was pure venom and hurting him, he wanted it. More. Fucking More of it. And then the new voice in his head awoke and began to speak. He knew what he was going to become, what you were all bound to become, but he tried his best in vain to change things. Admirable, the way he held it back through sheer force of will alone. For hours on end, he'd quiver and cry as he saw everything, lived everything that the voice showed him. And went beyond the realms of all that was possible.  
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_He wasn't alone._

_All over the world, from San Francisco to Shanghai, addiction of the opiate spread._

_Slowly, subtly, it began. An apathetic, sleeping world, long numbed and deliberately blinded to the secrets that ran everything, saw no correlation at first between every depression, every suicide, every spark of mania, even as the incidents of the masses escalated to new homicidal reaches. All the while, those who observed Subject 17 dared to search for answers. _

_Things reached critical mass soon enough. _

x+x

Where did you think you'd be, one year from now? Did you see yourself at your first day of college, hoping that after all the years of indecision, you'd finally figure out who you were and what you wanted as you took your first nervous steps forward? Did you hope of finding the confidence that was never there and finally asking her out or begging him to stop it? Did you find yourself dreaming of a better tomorrow, unknowing of the puppeteers who pulled the strings, the bastards who hid behind a front called Abstergo? Or did you find yourself lost like I did, trapped in a shit-bucket present with every future you could see was a sea of murkiness, the only shining light being that of the glint upon a pistol pressed against the side of your head before your finger pulled the trigger?

No matter what, none of us could've foreseen where we are now. Who could've predicted it, that we would now be living in the ultimate nightmare, a nightmare that we would never wake from? Tell me where I'd be now, I'd have laughed in your face. It would sound all too far-fetched, a scenario only cocked up in shitty Hollywood horror movies. But I shouldn't have laughed. After all, they once said: "Nothing is true, everything is permitted." And once more, no one could've guessed how deeply the word everything ran.

I can't forget anything, no matter how hard I try to. Whenever I close my eyes, drift away to sleep, I see it. I hear it. I breathe it. I relive single goddamn moment of waking hell. Planes falling from the skies over Washington. The dying screams of millions in the Middle East as they're consumed, silenced forever by nuclear hellfire. Stretches of highway with wrecked vehicles smelling of burned gasoline, doused in caking blood. The crunching sound the skull of a dead infant makes underneath the heel of your boot as you walk forward and everything that has happened to you has made you too numb to everything that will happen to care to look down as you keep walking in a world where the future no longer belongs to us.

And everything I just mentioned? Of course they just a tiny microcosm of the surface of the new collective nightmare of every human being who can still breath, who can still look in a mirror and see that their face isn't marked. The mark of the dark half.

They could've stopped it. The Templars, I mean. Bastards practically ruled the world. With all their resources, all their knowledge, it should've been a milk run. But being the dumb fucks they were, I guess they were too drunk on their own power to see that unlike us, the Assassins, this wasn't a problem that they could solve via sheer brute force. I don't know what it means, but I suppose there's some sort of significance to how quickly everything collapsed. Civilization many millennia in the making, pow, gone in a few days because some idiot didn't know how to best assess the red-level alert situation as it unfolded for him. But I guess I shouldn't be too critical. Not like we really could've done any better had it been us.

But still, regardless, fuck them. For what they did to me. In their quest for a better tomorrow, the shitheads.

So here we are now, one year later, taking a walk through the woods each with a handy dandy gun in hand. Hoping that whatever's nearby, it ain't them. We're all dirty and weary, the cold knives of the wind's chill upon our cut cheeks, beaten beyond our natural ages by what we have had to endure and do to stay alive. Ill-equipped to deal with what we've got ahead of us, running low on everything we need. All of us are little more than a bunch of fucked up shitters, running out of gas.

Rebecca. For some reason, she's become the light shining in the darkness just because she's got that big fucking bump in her belly swelling. Everyone else seems to want to keep her alive when all I see is a growing burden. As if there's gonna be a star twinkling over Bethlehem anytime soon. Lost the father, some cunt named Shaun, sometime during the initial chaos after the outbreak. Former Assassin, smart techie, but if not for her moderate talent with firearms, I know where her computer love would've gotten her. Nowhere pretty. You're a part of my nightmares, Becky, and I bet that they'll be a reality soon, if that bump don't go away soon. Maybe I should do something about that. About you.

William. Like Rebecca and I, he was an Assassin before all this. The goddamn leader. But he's in no state to lead, really. His own son, Desmond Miles, who everyone thought was the chosen one who would give us all the answers we ever needed, was the catalyst of C-Day. You know the big magic pedestal, the one from the big mysterious First Civilization? You see, Desmond thought he was going to sacrifice himself to give the world some time to save itself. No one knows how the infection really started. Maybe the pedestal didn't even have anything to do with it. But no matter what, Desmond was among the first of the first. Patient fucking Zero. The destroyer of worlds. William now? All torn up, unable to cope. Blaming himself. I almost smile as I remember what an asshole he used to be. How he's managed to go this long like he is without offing himself is a mystery. And as for Desmond… somewhere, he's still out there, and I shudder as I contemplate that.

Julie. She knows what a nightmare is. You know, she was on vacation when this all went down. With her two kids, whose photograph she still carries with her in a wallet of other useless junk just like the photo. When she opened the hotel door and saw what her sweet little boy and girl were doing to each other on the bed, what they had done to Dad and the maid, her nightmare hit home. You see, it wasn't the deed itself that was so damn scary for her. But rather, it was seeing their faces as they turned. The two red slashes. The Cross. And hearing the voice of evil itself, as it wore the faces of the two that mattered most to you, hearing it begging you to join them as they said the things you taught them so well to never say. She told us the story, and she hasn't said a single thing since. I almost felt sorry for her, knowing what it's like to lose what matters, before I remembered what attachment and sympathy and remembrance and all that has done to would-be survivors.

Barbara. Medical knowledge. Useful, but a load. She was in the hospital when it all happened, right in front of the maternity ward. What she saw scarred her, but unlike Julie, she hasn't shut up. Always blathering about them, about herself or someone she knew. I want to give her a good one, take out a few teeth, but it won't do us any good seeing how loose the seams holding us together are already. I want to live...

Michael. Most useless of us all. You know what he was? No, not an Assassin. Not a Templar. Nor any civvie job that could be considered useless. He was a writer, for crying out loud. A writer of fucking sleazy catfight fiction and other dirty, kinky shit. Unless you're one of them, a hard-on to wank with is gonna do you no good. Annoying ass. Always running his mouth off about how Assassins and Templars couldn't have been possible. Must've survived through sheer luck alone. Maybe I should stick with him, as insane as that sounds.

Yves. He was a CEO of some big-name entertainment company from France, who had Abstergo cock deep in his mouth. Scratch that, what I said about Michael. This fucking surrender monkey is the most useless of us. At least Michael, in spite of the useless fucking weasel he is, tries to pull his weight. Yves was overseas in Montreal on a business trip when the outbreak hit, and he survived by hiding behind others as they died at the hands of batshit-insane-level sadists. Still expects the five-star CEO treatment even when his position and riches matter no longer. So what if those fucking video games you published made millions and revolutionized the industry? If I could stuff your throat and choke you to death with all your useless fucking money and achievements, I would.

The Finns. Family from Finland. Daddy was one of the bigwig Templars, and the one who finally pushed Desmond over the edge, the one who gave him the cross. Good old Otso Berg should've died that day, punished for what he did to all seven billion of us on this world, but like a coward he ran as his men died and punishment has eluded him and his family – useless wife and little girl who are just gonna drag us down. He's going to get us all killed, butt-fucked, and eaten – in that order, if we're lucky. He hasn't forgotten his old allegiances, and he's always butting heads with William. Seriously, what a fucking piece of shit he is. The world has gone to hell, and you still fucking care about Assassins vs. Templars and all that shit when now there is no world for you to "save?" Ex-military, too. Idiot with a first-class, alpha-mentality who thinks that somehow with enough bullets and organization, we can win something that can't be won. In other words, far too caught up in the past without a single hope. Wife is a nag, daughter needs special _Abstergo-brand_ medication both of them whine. I hate them. How many close calls have we had searching pharmacies for their special meds? We've already lost three on the road so far. Try not to think about how they died. Useless fucks, I wish I could kill you all just for being alive. But nooo… what would make me any different from them, as Rebecca, darling little angel she is, might say?

No trust to be made amongst any of us. As you might've guessed, if the time comes to it, I'm ready to stab all of them in the back to ensure my own survival. And I bet all of them have considered it too. As the wise man once said, the only thing worth dying for is survival. Others being the ones who die, of course. In the movies, that's what gets them all killed in the end, but I've seen what happens to people who tried to play things like the movies. I saw what was in their eyes, the horror as they died at the hands of the monsters. And that is not something I want to know. I want to survive.

And as for my story… fuck you. You don't even get to know my name. All you need to know that I'm a real selfish bastard who once had delusions that they could've been something good, a fool who dared to think that they could've brought a better future. Unlike some of my traveling contemporaries, I didn't lose everything that mattered to me at C-Day. No, it was twelve years before. The time of the Great Purge, when the Templars wiped us from the map.

That was when everything that in another life, mattered, was taken from me. When I saw the world for what it really was for the first time, and as the smoke cleared, the chambers of automatics collectively clicking an empty rattle, I knew what I was as I didn't even feel the bullet wounds in my body as I cried while I clutched the body of my daughter and lover as the Abstergo mercenaries taunted me. They took their turns beating me, and then they left me to bleed out.

But I didn't. And through cursed, gritted teeth, I ignored the pain that coursed through me. I ignored the tears that filled my eyes as I carried their lifeless forms in my arms, tears that blinded me when I began to dig. From that day forth, I always carried one semi-auto on me. With a bullet saved for one person.

But I never used it. Because I knew what I was after I buried my family, as hatred and self-loathing consumed me. Me, knowing that I had lost everything, feeling that nagging feeling that if I had fought back harder, I could've saved them or gone to them in a final fucking blaze of glory.

What am I? An Assassin no longer. A survivor, trudging forward, licking my wounds and trying to forget yesterday even thought I know that I'll never be able to let go like the petty rat I am. Trying to stay alive, even when I have no reason to. When no one has a reason to. Someone who knows just what a hateful piece of shit they are, but also someone who has come to terms with it. Accepted themselves for who they are.

Some things haven't changed. I still carry that semi-auto on me, waiting for when I finally realize the futility of surviving. But unlike the days when I had a creed to follow, there's no more pretending. Pretending that there's any real difference between us and the monsters. Pretending that at the end of the tunnel, there'll be a light like I did when I was an Assassin. Don't believe me? Oh, trust me, you'll have plenty of time to find out between now and the day of your demise.

Welcome to the world as it is, bud. No one's coming to save you.

There is no hope.

There is no escape.

There is no end.

There is only the Crossed.


End file.
